Enterprise Upgrade Program

Well, there would be no EU funding available for this as it will potentially be to a 3rd country due to Brexit, so I would suspect it's very unlikely to happen anytime soon.

It's a project that would have been a very obvious candidate for funds from TEN-T.

Also, due to a dispute about bilingual signage and gay marriage, there is no Northern Ireland assembly. So, the proposal is clearly nonsense as there's nobody to drive this kind of project through. The Northern Secretary will operate on the basis that she's just a caretaker to maintain the status quo and UK public expenditure is constantly being slashed.

I suspect this is total pie-in-the-sky stuff and sounds more like a wish list from Translink and Iarnród Éireann.

Iarnród Éireann needs to concentrate on commuter services at the moment and possibly getting a few key intercity services up to speed, with existing technology.

Actually, getting the Enterprise up to the maximum speed for the existing trains and locomotives would be far more useful than what they're proposing. It's a very short journey anyway and the coaches were all just upgraded.

I wonder would a more useful medium term project be to purchase a fleet of pointy, 200km/h capable locomotives with better fuel efficiency and acceleration characteristics, possibly designed to run on biofuel and use those to head and tail the push-pull sets for Belfast and Cork services with the existing De Dietrich and CAF coaches. Paint the locos in a neutral livery, without logos e.g. perhaps a colour like silver that and you could end up with very good looking, modern push-pull services that could be a lot more speed-capable and eco-friendly without massive expenditure. You'd also have a pool of them that could be swapped around as maintenance needs to be done as both the CAF MK4 and De Dietrich fleets are pretty tiny on their own. The MK4 fleet could also get a bit of a re-livery and maybe an early life sprucing up to do a relaunch too. Something like that might come in at about 10% to 15% of the cost of what's being proposed and still have significant impact on environmental impact, timings and so on.

From what I can see, using more intelligent signalling and adding a 3rd track on some of the Dublin commuter lines would be useful and more passing loops / waiting areas. I'm fairly confident that you could make better use of very high quality modern signalling and some bi-directional running for an Enterprise line for example? The frequencies aren't that high - it could get the Enterprise and high speed long-distance commuters past most of the bottle necks other than the narrow parts of the DART line.

There are definitely some cheaper and more creative options that don't involve going to full TGV-like high speed or massive construction projects.

In terms of priorities in the Republic at the moment, converting the Dublin commuter services to electric running would seem to me to be a priority to reduce CO2 footprints. Also getting some proper investment into things like trams and BRT in Dublin, Cork and at the very least BRT into Galway and Limerick should e urgently done. We can't just keep growing dependency on cars and fossil fuel commuter rail.

It always baffled me that CIE built new commuter services with diesel trains. I would have thought that all of the Dublin ones and probably the Cork-Midleton-Cobh-Mallow routes should have been developed as electric services, purely with the idea that they could run without CO2 footprints using renewables as the power system moves over to better energy sources.

It just seems really strange to see diesel commuter rail in Dublin in particular. It's very incongruous with what happens elsewhere in Europe. They look more like rural regional trains.

If you wanted to increase capacity in the medium term, the cheapest and simplest solution would be to get Hyundai / Tokyo car to built a version of the Irish Rail Intercity Railcars to an Enterprise spec.

There's no point in having some weird vehicle that doesn't share common parts / maintenance with something else on this island.